Marina Mónaco
Marina Mónaco is a photographer and film director from Buenos Aires, based in Berlin, and working worldwide. Her practice encloses raw documentary photography, portrait series, and the visual expression of cold, dark sound. Exploring the spectrum of DIY youth culture across suburban Europe, her body of work documents counterculture ways. Combining digital and analog, Super 8 and VHS, Mónaco’s ongoing series Kids explores intimate portraits. Through them, a sense of nostalgia for lives not lived encounter the vulnerability of a bedroom as an extension of her subject's inner world. In Neue Welle, her latest body of work, she utilizes 35mm and medium formats that result in high-contrast, grained, mainly black-and-white photography - raw, nostalgic atmospheres that permeate the ineffable pain of coming of age. This series sits somewhere between documentary, portraiture, and a narrative that follows her collaboration with muse Nils Keppel; an evolving relation which both mirrors and influences their self-perceptions as artists within the German new wave scene. In Mónaco’s work, falling in love, breaking one’s heart, or making art alongside close friends become at once rites of passage and instants that evade a sense of disenchantment with the world.
SMS
Sofia Mastrogiacomo, aka SMS, is a graphic designer and creative director. Her practice links conceptual and curatorial work in collaboration with artists.
Under SMS’ vision, encrypted symbolisms, belief systems, and physical laws become complexly articulated to serve an ever-expanding, www-inspired logic. Sound and the written become the primal matter of her own code, in which maximalist minimalism and typography inform timelines where cyber and primitive connect. Currently based in Berlin and working worldwide, she is the visual director of the Buenos Aires-based label Fractura and co-founder of the curatorial duo Spiritual Technologies.
Guy Lougashi
In his artistic practice, Lougashi explores, within his paper sculptures and installations, the archaeology of the unknown, as well as the essence of cellulose—both a catalyst and an autonomous entity. While his practice consists of an act rather than a result—developing in the form of an external consciousness—what is left behind can be seen as conceptual embodiments of his way of being. In Lougashi’s work, paper becomes the axis for a process of self-recognition: a suspended state taking the form of repetitive noting. At times a mantra, at others a hectic iteration, the same unfolds through the rough and tender confines within. Through his eye for distance and depth, Lougashi brings the technical capacities of his medium to its highest degree of improbability. In his universe, paper as a concept is both the premise and the promise for alternative reality systems to emerge. Layering white upon white, his constructions interact with light and space with the gesture of that which is both loudly absent and silently present. Adopting the form of installations, his sculptures inhabit containers ranging from acrylic to glass—spatial atmospheres that provide them with an auratic latency beyond the notion of a frame. Lougashi’s narrative can be read as one of ruins or one of coordinates; but ultimately, as an exercise in tracing. Both tragic and beautiful, his research and practice result in spatial displays: the archaic remnants of inner transcendence.
Yan Lozov
Yan Lozov is a Sofia-born, Barcelona-based visual artist. In his universe, long-forgotten narratives juxtapose with the idea of defying contemporary codes of being in the world. Lozov’s practice comprises painting, sketching, and tattooing. In his motifs, anime and videogame influences meet encrypted symbolism in heraldry, the substance of dreams, and the mundane. Sharp and raw imprints strike with the force of the here-and-now: a street-fashion vision, a rap song or Wikipedia find meeting through timeline collisions and impossible hybrids. Through preferred materials that alternate between cheap artifacts of mass consumption such as BIC pens and the timelessness of oil paint, Lozov narrates the quest for a sense of self—at once his own and a reflection of the post-internet era he is part of.
Lazar Georgiev
Lazar Georgiev is a visual artist born in Ruse, Bulgaria, and based in Barcelona. His paintings explore the Eastern European upbringing in suburbia, woven with tales of the mystic and the old. The corridor of a night train, a local legend, or the oxidized gestures of time become physical imprints of symbolic notations. Through Georgiev’s practice, childhood states of consciousness, social narratives shaping identity, and raw experiences of everyday life inform his photographic memory and various painting mediums. At once archival matter and components of brief reports, his familiar objects shift to the ominous and the oniric, serving as studies on his personal story and the collective.
Lena Becerra
Lena Becerra is an artist from Buenos Aires, now based in Berlin, working across multiple mediums. Her surgically arranged ecosystems summon contemplation of alternative forms of social fabric in a gestational stage. The sinister and sublime converge as part of a cyclical call for rebirth. Her installations feature arthropod-like organisms and their embryonic fluctuations. Within a visceral existence, black intra-body chambers create spaces of absence with the potential to give birth to the unknown. Combining the idea of scientific investigation and hybridization, her webworks explore alternative ways of inhabiting the world, tensing and often diluting the boundaries between human and non-human, sexuality, nature, and the industrial in order to address the mystery of being.